The Church of Somewhere
The King's Majesty hath the chief power in this Realm of England, and other his Dominions, unto whom the chief Government of all Estates of this Realm, whether they be Ecclesiastical or Civil, in all causes doth appertain, and is not, nor ought to be, subject to any foreign Jurisdiction - Article XXXVII
Close to the heart of Anglicanism is the idea of the "particular or national Church" (Article XXXIV). The Anglican experience emerges from and is shaped by the experience of one such "particular or national Church", this experience giving rise to other particular or national Churches, receiving its wisdom, living it out within the 'realm' - the place - of which they are a part.
In the words of John Hughes:
As the name indicates, we are not a Church defined by a confession or founder, but by geography and culture.
And so, the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America said of itself in 1789:
But when in the course of Divine Providence, these American States became independent with respect to civil government, their ecclesiastical independence was necessarily included.
Similarly, the Church of Ireland at disestablishment in 1870 stated:
... this the Ancient Catholick and Apostolick Church of Ireland.
Place, culture and - therefore - polity are caught up in the Anglican experience and also necessarily shape that experience. If the Faith is not to be either abstraction or sectarian phenomenon, it must be embedded within place, culture and polity, both orienting them toward the True, the Good, and the Beautiful, and celebrating how they bring us in our common life to participate in these transcendentals.
As Philip North, bishop of Burnley has said, "Place includes not just local community but the nation". This reflects the enduring Anglican understanding that the Gospel addresses the nation, and is to be lived out in national life - "all the whole Realm".
It is against this background that we can understand the significance of two recent blog posts commenting on the Church of England and the Brexit debate. Elizaphanian states:
The Church of England doesn’t have a functioning theology of what a nation is, which means that it doesn’t know how to call a nation back to a faithful religious life. This is something of a problem when the name of a nation is in your self-description.
It struck me as odd that the national church should have so little so say that was positive about the very idea of the nation state. The Bishop of Burnley complained that too many clergy squirm uncomfortably through Remembrance Day services. He’s right: despite the Queen being the head of the Church of England, some look as though they are crossing their fingers behind their backs when they sing the National Anthem.
The discontinuity this signals with Anglicanism's historic experience - and, indeed, its foundational experience - is quite staggering. It is (at the least) possible that the Hauerwas school anti-Christendom theology has contributed to and/or justified this rupture with the Anglican experience. As a result, Anglicanism ceases to be the Church of Somewhere and becomes the Church of Anywhere. This language is taken from David Goodhart, who is quoted by Fraser regarding the Lambeth Palace meeting:
The trouble with this bit of the Church is that they have turned themselves into a subaltern ideological sub-set of the Anywhere liberal class – the educated, mobile, secular, cognitive class, with its bias toward the rational, the open, the autonomous, the individual.
There are two significant problems with the Church of Anywhere. The first is that it accepts late modernity's impoverished understanding of what it is to be human, in which "autonomy and fluidity" are prized and prioritised. A key defining force for this fluid identity is the Market and its demands. Herein lies a deep irony, for the Church of Anywhere reflects the values of the capitalism and consumerism that we often hear it decrying. In other words, it offers a weak vision of human flourishing, not rooted and grounded in the attachments and solidarity which have given expression to the Creator's intent: "It is not good that the man should be alone".
Secondly, the Church of Anywhere fails to address the yearning in contemporary culture for an identity and meaning richer and deeper than "autonomy and fluidity". Philip Blond has described it as "the age of insecurity":
The tectonic shift taking place now is away from liberalism in both its social and economic forms. Why now? Because contemporary liberalism has brought relentless and unprecedented insecurity to more and more people in the postwar developed western world. Economic stability has been denied to increasing numbers of people, deepening class inequality while also penalising and polarising according to age, education and geography. Socially, modern liberalism has undermined working-class communities and their structures of solidarity through a combination of mass migration and minority/identity politics. The result has been an increasingly successful revolt against the consequences and practices of both forms of contemporary liberalism.
In a moment of cultural yearning for identity, meaning and solidarity - for a renewed experience of place, culture, and polity - a Church of Somewhere would be able to embody and share a vision of common life deepened, ennobled and sanctified. This requires, in the words of Elizaphanian, "a functioning theology of what a nation is" - a Christendom understanding (O'Donovan's "the obedience of rulers") which therefore also challenges and exposes darker, fundamentally pagan accounts of the nation which can arise in the age of insecurity.
Anglicanism has historically sustained a range of practices which have ordered the life of polis and nation towards the Real, towards participation in the Kingdom and City of God, thus sanctifying and celebrating shared life in the commonwealth - through the liturgy consistently praying for monarch or president; in the parish church holding the royal coat of arms or the national flag; in the liturgical observance of Accession Day, or Dominion Day, or Independence Day; in national cathedrals being centres of prayer on civic and state occasions.Renewing and cherishing these practices can be a means of reviving a theology of the nation, ending the Hauerwasian embarrassment with Christendom, recognising afresh that they embody a rich understanding of the commonweal. They are practices of a Church of Somewhere, rather than a Church of Anywhere in which the philosophy of autonomy and fluidity prevent any meaningful discernment of, engagement with, and thanksgiving for place, culture, and nation.
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